Thoughts on books, reading and publishing from the staff and friends of the Tattered Cover Book Store.

Sunday, February 3, 2013

“Conklin persuasively intertwines the stories of two women separated by time and circumstances but united by a quest for justice...Stretching back and forth across time and geography, this riveting tale is bolstered by some powerful universal truths.” --Booklist

Two remarkable women, separated by more than a century, whose lives unexpectedly intertwine . . .

2004: Lina Sparrow is an ambitious young lawyer working on a historic
class-action lawsuit seeking reparations for the descendants of American
slaves.

1852: Josephine is a seventeen-year-old house slave who tends to the
mistress of a Virginia tobacco farm—an aspiring artist named Lu Anne
Bell.

It is through her father, renowned artist Oscar Sparrow, that Lina
discovers a controversy rocking the art world: art historians now
suspect that the revered paintings of Lu Anne Bell, an antebellum artist
known for her humanizing portraits of the slaves who worked her
Virginia tobacco farm, were actually the work of her house slave,
Josephine.

A descendant of Josephine's would be the per-fect face for the
lawsuit—if Lina can find one. But nothing is known about Josephine's
fate following Lu Anne Bell's death in 1852. In piecing together
Josephine's story, Lina embarks on a journey that will lead her to
question her own life, including the full story of her mother's
mysterious death twenty years before.

Alternating between antebellum Virginia and modern-day New York, this
searing tale of art and history, love and secrets explores what it means
to repair a wrong, and asks whether truth can be more important than
justice.